“Another?” the bartender asks, pointing at her empty wineglass. She shouldn’t. Dr. Graydon said two, max. But Holly was watching Gabriel, and Eli had embarrassed her in front of an entire restaurant of people, and lest she forget how pathetic her life had become, her Bumble date had never showed. The worst part is, she didn’t even want to go out, but she felt bad that the first date they were supposed to have got sidelined by her unexpected trip to the ER, and was trying to make it up to him. In retrospect, she probably shouldn’t have mentioned the colostomy bag in their text exchange this afternoon, but she didn’t think that was something to surprise someone with.
“Please,” she says, pushing her glass toward the bartender.
Emotional stress. After the surgery, that was what Dr. Graydon listed as one of the possible culprits that could have caused her condition. She nearly bit her tongue off to keep from maniacally laughing when he asked if she’d been under stress lately. Does the pope wear a funny hat?
When the bartender sets the wine in front of her, she pulls up Instagram, just in case her no-show Bumble date is checking it, and snaps a selfie with the full glass. It’s terrible, so she does another, and then another. Finally, she gets one that’s passable and tags it: #roseallday #winelife #momsnightout. She downs her wine, pays the bill with her American Express—the one credit card that isn’t completely maxed out—and walks out into the warm, idyllic night of Hope Springs. But when the door to the restaurant closes behind her, she freezes. The parking lot, though scattered with cars, is otherwise deserted. Still. Too still. A familiar fear creeps up her spine, raising the fine blond hairs on the back of her neck. She nearly turns back inside to ask the bartender to walk her to her car, but then gives her head a firm shake.
It’s just the wine; her vivid imagination. Eli got in a cab. He left. He wouldn’t come back. He might be temperamental—even violent at times, when his rage got the best of him—but he wasn’t crazy.
Still, she hurries to her sister’s pickup truck—one more thing she owes her sister for, since Eli kept the one car they owned and she can’t afford a new one just yet—and unlocks it as quickly as she can, sliding in and starting the engine in one fluid motion. It occurs to her once she’s on Mechanic that she probably shouldn’t be driving, considering she drank her three glasses of wine on an empty stomach. Then again, there are a lot of things she probably shouldn’t have done in her life, starting with marrying her ex-husband. But how was she to know?
How do you ever know who anyone really is before you marry them? And furthermore, how did anybody get it right? It seems to Whitney to be pure luck—or bad luck in her case. Of course, that’s not to say there weren’t signs. Like their fourth date, when he accused her of flirting with the tractor operator at a pumpkin patch and didn’t speak to her the entire ride home. Then later, threw her favorite ceramic coffee mug so hard at the wall that it broke the handle clear off. But the next day, chagrined, he glued it back and apologized profusely, saying he had such strong feelings for her, it scared him. It scared Whitney, too, but also made her feel something else—prized, worshipped, treasured—things she’d always wanted to feel, but never had.
Besides, the pumpkin patch had been his idea, and what kind of guy suggests that for a date, she reasoned. A sensitive, kind one. The type of man she’d been looking for.
And he was, so much of the time. Except when he wasn’t.
Whitney pulls the car up to the curb in front of her sister’s duplex and sits there staring at the blue light glowing from the living room window. And she wonders for the hundredth time if she’s doing the right thing. Uprooting Gabriel from the only home he’s ever known, from his father (because, for all his faults, Eli truly was a good father).
Sighing, she opens the door and stands, placing her hand on her colostomy bag. It’s secured to her stomach, but she’s still not used to it yet and lives with the general anxiety it will fall off at any second. A colostomy bag! She sighs again and wonders how her life came to this.
She lets herself into the house with the key Holly made her and locks the door behind her. Holly has fallen asleep on the couch—and no wonder, Whitney thinks as she recognizes Antiques Roadshow on the screen.
Wearily she pads down the short hall and into the bedroom she’s sharing with Gabriel. She gently sits on the double bed beside his tiny sleeping frame and puts a hand on his cheek, feeling her heartbeat slow, her entire body calm with the nearness of her son. Before becoming a mother, she didn’t know it was possible to love anything the way she loves her son. And though she adores his snaggletoothed smile, the overenthusiasm with which he delivers poorly constructed knock-knock jokes, even the manic repetitive noise of him practicing the drums, there’s something about her sleeping boy that particularly tugs at her heartstrings.
And it’s in this moment, she simultaneously knows that though it is right to leave Eli, it was also right to marry him. Because how could she possibly regret a decision that resulted in this most perfectly imperfect boy? She doesn’t deserve Gabriel, she knows that much. But she’d do anything in the world necessary to keep him.
She carefully changes out of her silk blouse and designer jeans—an outfit wasted on her no-show date—and retreats to the bathroom to empty her bag, brush her teeth and scrub her face. Then she tugs on a loose T-shirt and pajama pants and goes back into the den to turn off the television and rouse her sister.
Holly yawns and sits up after Whitney softly jostles her shoulder. “How was your date?”
“Nonexistent. I got stood up.”
“Oh. Sorry,” Holly says, reaching for a Dorito from the open bag on the coffee table.
And then something occurs to Whitney and she’s startled it’s the first time she’s thinking it. “Hey—did Eli call you? Did you tell him where I was tonight?”
“What? Of course not.” Holly crunches the chip and then licks the powdered cheese off her fingers.
And that’s when the fear from the parking lot grips her in earnest; the same fear she has felt in flashes over the years, when Eli’s temper boils over. When he does things she never thought him capable of. And yet, he’s proven her wrong, time and again.
And now, he’s proven one more thing: He knows how to find her, even when she doesn’t want to be found.
Chapter 14
The Jerome L. Greene Science Center looks like a Frank Lloyd Wright creation on steroids: all glass and metal and right angles. Oliver came to the city yesterday for some dinner meeting with Penn Carro, so I drove to Philly at the crack of dawn and took the train into Manhattan to meet him for our ten a.m. appointment. I’m fifteen minutes early. I slide onto a bench and watch the college students, laden with book bags, curved over their phones, amble by on their way to class. And even though the campus is like a completely different world—expansive bright walkways and vibrant green spaces separating the stately Gothic buildings—dropped in the middle of New York City, I revel in the bustle, the spark of energy absent in sleepy small towns like Hope Springs. I realize just how much I miss it. How isolated I’ve felt.